Elsevier

Business Horizons

Volume 53, Issue 1, January–February 2010, Pages 59-68
Business Horizons

Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bushor.2009.09.003Get rights and content

Abstract

The concept of Social Media is top of the agenda for many business executives today. Decision makers, as well as consultants, try to identify ways in which firms can make profitable use of applications such as Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, Second Life, and Twitter. Yet despite this interest, there seems to be very limited understanding of what the term “Social Media” exactly means; this article intends to provide some clarification. We begin by describing the concept of Social Media, and discuss how it differs from related concepts such as Web 2.0 and User Generated Content. Based on this definition, we then provide a classification of Social Media which groups applications currently subsumed under the generalized term into more specific categories by characteristic: collaborative projects, blogs, content communities, social networking sites, virtual game worlds, and virtual social worlds. Finally, we present 10 pieces of advice for companies which decide to utilize Social Media.

Section snippets

The specter of Social Media

As of January 2009, the online social networking application Facebook registered more than 175 million active users. To put that number in perspective, this is only slightly less than the population of Brazil (190 million) and over twice the population of Germany (80 million)! At the same time, every minute, 10 hours of content were uploaded to the video sharing platform YouTube. And, the image hosting site Flickr provided access to over 3 billion photographs, making the world-famous Louvre

What is Social Media—And what is it not?

As highlighted, the idea behind Social Media is far from groundbreaking. Nevertheless, there seems to be confusion among managers and academic researchers alike as to what exactly should be included under this term, and how Social Media differ from the seemingly-interchangeable related concepts of Web 2.0 and User Generated Content. It therefore makes sense to take a step back and provide insight regarding where Social Media come from and what they include.

By 1979, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis

Collaborative projects

Collaborative projects enable the joint and simultaneous creation of content by many end-users and are, in this sense, probably the most democratic manifestation of UGC. Within collaborative projects, one differentiates between wikis—that is, websites which allow users to add, remove, and change text-based content—and social bookmarking applications—which enable the group-based collection and rating of Internet links or media content. Exemplary applications within this category include the

Ten pieces of advice for companies deciding to use Social Media

Social Media is a very active and fast-moving domain. What may be up-to-date today could have disappeared from the virtual landscape tomorrow. It is therefore crucial for firms to have a set of guidelines that can be applied to any form of Social Media, whether they are part of the aforementioned list or not. Next, we provide such a set of recommendations. Given that Social Media have both a social- and a media-component, we split our advice into two sections: five points about using media and

Nothing to lose but their chains

Today, everything is about Social Media. Some industry gurus claim that if you do not participate in Facebook, YouTube, and Second Life, you are not part of cyberspace anymore. Social Media allow firms to engage in timely and direct end-consumer contact at relatively low cost and higher levels of efficiency than can be achieved with more traditional communication tools. This makes Social Media not only relevant for large multinational firms, but also for small and medium sized companies, and

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